significance in performance: mythos, ethos, logos

Thomas M. Olshewsky
New College of Florida
United States of America
[email protected]
What unifies a culture is the integration of its mythos,
ethos and logos. The core meaning of mythos in ancient
Greek was that of story or of talk, but I mean to speak of it
here in a broader way that reflects the orientations of a
culture. That orientation lays a basis for the culture’s ethos,
its social customs and individual habits of ways of acting in
the world, and for its logos, its ways of accounting for what
goes on in the world. We can view developments of
disintegration in Hellenic culture that opened the way to
cultural pluralism, and we can find in much of 20 th century
thought various resistances to participation in any common
mythos these call unity of our own cultural orientations into
question.

The individual stories that we tell are reflective of the

ways we live in the world. These stories are often enacted in
ritual – not only in religious ceremony, but in fables, poems,
plays, art and music that depict how things are and how
things ought to be. While we may know only in derivative
ways the stories told in archaic Greece, but may well
suppose that they were depicted in ritual performances of
the way the world as we know it came to be. As the sky gods
married and settled down with the earth goddesses, a
blending of cultures took place that remained an uneasy
alliance even in the times of the homeric poems. As the
Olympian gods attained control of the universe, the ordering
of nature with its allocated powers and responsibilities came
into more understandable focus, and there developed not
only ways of accounting for the world as lived in (a logos),
but guides for ways of living in it (an ethos). This interplay
of mythos with logos and ethos found its life in ritual
performances that laid the basis for performances of human
life.

By the time of the Hellenic Period, Homer and Hesiod

were seen as the preservers of a sense of such integration.
Homer presents us with the primacy of the divine, but in
interaction with the affairs human beings. The Iliad gives us
the conflicts of various divine powers interacting with
human conflicts in the Trojan Wars, but the Odyssey offers
us a more coherent divine council exercising its power in
destiny over human error, and an ordered universe abiding
by dike in counterpoint to tyke. Where Homer depicted
heroic virtue as the model for aristocrats, Hesiod offered in
Works and Days a broader account from a peasant
perspective, connecting justice with work, and in the
Theogony, eulogized the Horai (Dike, Eunomia and
Eirene), daughters of Zeus and Themis, as the deities that
take care of the works of men. Taken together, Homer and
Hesiod wove a basis for a mythos of panhellenic culture
which implied an ethos in an ordered cosmos.

The ethos of a culture is what constitutes its ways of

valuing and acting. Richard Swader and his cultural
psychology colleagues identified three dimensions of an
ethos in any culture: The autonomous, concerned with
individual freedom and security; the communal, concerned
with finding one's place in the customs and traditions of the
community through obedience and loyalty; and the
transcendental, concerned with preserving a sense of
divinity by maintaining its purity. i These dimensions can be
integrated in a culture by its mythos, its story of ways of
being in the world. These stories are often enacted in ritual –
not only religious ceremony, but fables, poems, and
theatricals, paintings and sculptures that depict how things
are and how things ought to be. The logos of a culture is its
ways of accounting for how things are. In an integrated
culture, the ethos, mythos and logos are related in such a
way that the accounting proceeds from the story and lays the
basis for attitudes and actions through the understanding that
the story discloses why we do things this way.

What ties together an ethos with its mythos is the

enactment of the story, which then lays a basis for how to act
in the customs and habits of everyday life. In performance

i
Shwader, R. A., et al, “The ‘big three of morality (autonomy, community
and divinity),” in A. Brandt and P. Rozin (Eds.), Morality and Health
(Routledge, N. Y., 1997), pp. 119-169.
the dimensions of autonomy, community and divinity are
integrated. This is still ritualistically expressed in some
religious practices today. The assertion, “We were all slaves
together in the land of Egypt and God brought us out by a
mighty hand,” spoken at a Passover feast, gives at once the
dramatic participation of the current community in the
divine redemption, and gives rationale for benevolent
behavior toward those in the community less fortunate. The
mythos of Orthodox Christianity was kept alive under the
watchful eye of communist oppression by the ability of the
parents to teach their children the story through the
exemplification of church icons. However the mythos is
enacted, it becomes a logos for ways of being in the world,
and thus an ethos for ways of acting. The performance
brings the ethos out of a simple autonomy and gives that
autonomy a place in community with a rationale based in
divinity.

What we know of Hellenic Greece is that the culture

was for a while able to carry forward the integration of
mythos, ethos and logos through the dramatic uses of poesis.
True poesis was seen as a making that was the disclosure of
divinity. Rather than stepping out from the established
mythos of tradition, it could be seen as an expression of
divine revelation that made more sense of the human
condition. Understanding became acceptance of the newly
revealed story through participation in its performance, both
in the presentation of the poet and in living out that
presentation in a reordered life. Thus, the poet who was able
in his or her poetry to disclose such divine inspiration that
made sense of ways of being and acting in the world was
credited with special honor. We find in the Prometheus of
Hesiod only the Evil One punished by Zeus for stealing fire
from heaven, profaning the purity reserved for divinity.
Aeschylus gives us a more heroic vision of an innovative
genius who undertook a civilizing act on behalf of suffering
humanity at the risk of eternal punishment. This modifies
the mythos from a subservient work ethos to one open to
techne for improving the human condition, but with the
recognition that contingency constraints continue to plague
the human condition that separates it from the divine. In a
similar way, the Orestean trilogy concludes in the furies of
vengeful retribution being displaced by the judgment of
juried law. These performances of poesis led to participation
of the audiences in new ways of understanding their place in
the world, while maintaining the integration of logos with
ethos and mythos.

What led to disintegration from the times of Aeschylus

to those of Pericles were a combination of a variety of
forces.ii The Persians united the Hellenes against a common
enemy, but by the same token presented an alternative
culture that challenged the Olympian mythos. The sophists
contrasted the good according to law and custom with that
according to nature, and offered a logos detached from
mythos and ethos. The drama of Euripides depicted not the
integration but the rising conflicts of values that opened the
way to comedic parody. So Aristophanes was able to depict
in The Frogs a contest between Aeschylus and Euripides,
ii
Werner Jaeger, in Paideia (OUP, N.Y., 1945), attributed the
disintegration mainly to the Persian Wars. Karen Armstrong, A Short
History of Myth (Cannongate, Edinburgh, 2005), maintained that it was
urbanization. No single rationale will likely accurately account for the drift
away from a unifying mythos.
and a Dionysius, abstracted from performance, depicted as
reading a play by Euripides, now dead. With such
disintegration Werner Jaeger concluded, “The collapse of
society was only the outward and visible sign of the collapse
of individual character.” (Jaeger, I, 336)

Without integration of the story with ethos and logos in

performance, mythos became an abstracted story, an allusion
to divine mystery out of the scope of understanding. No
where is such seen so clearly as in the dialogues of Plato
when he reverts to a story with divine authority
(recollection in the Meno, love in the Symposium, the myth
of Ur in the Republic, to name but a few). In these stories, he
offers from the distance of telling another's story (“wise men
and women about divine matters,” Diotima, Ur), a
suggestion of understanding. These were cases in which he
had as yet no explanation or argument, but found in the
story the point of his conviction. He evidently has drawn
conclusions for which he is not yet ready or able to present
reasons. In this way, the whole of the Timaeus could be
considered a mythos, but not owned by participation, yet
treated as a true account (alethinon logon) rather than a
made-up story (me plasthenta mython).

Over against these abstracted uses of myths by Plato

stands his famous critique of stories as fictions in Republic,
Book III. What we need take particular note of is not just the
critique of falsehood in words (an echo of Thucydides'
lament in Pelopponecian Wars III about the transvaluation
of virtues through the manipulation of words). The focus of
Plato's critique is the prohibition of performances of stories
that excuse bad action. The question is whether to let poets
narrate through imitation. Aeschylus had introduced a
second actor distinct from the chorus and Sophocles had
introduced a third. With these theatrical innovations it was
possible to have the poet speak perspectives not his own.
Drama was no longer the single voice of the poet, but the
interplay of multiple perspectives. Plato has Socrates note
that the poet can give simple narration without imitation, but
it is in imitation that moral hazards come in. “Or, haven't
you noticed that imitations practiced from youth become
part of nature, and settle into habits of gesture, voice, and
thought?” ((395d) So, the poesis of the poet to be preferred
in the ideal state is one where simple narrative is preferred
and any imitations in his poetry must be limited by moral
decency (398). This moved to curtail false stories by
representing only the true makes the stories told an
instrument of the morality to be grounded in a philosophical
account. It thus inverts the classical relation of logos and
ethos to mythos.

There seems an irony in this managed creativity. It

advocates a reconstruction of the integrative harmony of
mythos, ethos, and logos, but at the price of constraining the
creativity of poesis as a revelation of the divine. The
Athenian in Laws II advocated an understanding of
legislation as being integrated into performance of dance
and song through rhythm and harmony, but he maintained in
Laws IV a sharp contrast between poet and legislator: “when
the poet takes his seat on the tripod of the Muse, he cannot
control his thoughts. He's like a fountain where the water is
allowed to gush forth unchecked. His art is the art of
representation, and when he represents men in contrasting
characters he is often obliged to contradict himself, and he
doesn't know which of the opposing speeches contains the
truth” (719c). The legislator must not let his law say
different things on the same subject. His preamble offers an
account of the law for the understanding of the citizen,
making the logos serve for cooperation rather than coercion
in the enactment of the law. Thus, the drama would become
no longer one of participation in performance through a
mythos, but a presentation of a logos for an ethos.

Needless to say, this idealistic inversion of the

traditional relations of mythos, ethos and logos was never
enacted in a Hellenic society. Yet, the Platonic ideal had its
effects on the attitudes about stories that tended to separate
them from the practices of a people no longer guided by the
traditional accounts of divine origins. By the time we get
Aristotle's elegant analysis of tragedy and epic, we find the
notion of a mythos reduced to “simply the combination of
the incidents or things done” (1450a4) in the drama, an
aspect which is calculated for cathartic effect rather than
participatory engagement of how to act and think and be. He
credits Epicharmus (who was noted at the time for parodies
in which even the gods were satirized and the heroes
ridiculed) with the invention of mythos in comedy. He
credits Crates with advancing the art by moving stories
away from the invective to a general and non-personal
nature (1449b5-9). Such moves in the actual workings of
poetic expression were every bit as responsible for removing
mythos from personal engagement in mythic performance as
where the urges to a rationalistic ideal of a logos.

A common commentary on these developments is expressed

in the title of Henri Frankfort's essay, “The Emancipation of
Thought from Myth.”iii Our cultivated attitudes are to treat
myths as fables of archaic religious views, blocking any
sense of the mythic as a performative basis for ways of
doing and thinking and being. Our own times have seen a
variety of anti-mythical movements that reinforce these
cultivated attitudes. Most notably, perhaps, is the
“emancipation” of science from religion. The
iii
In Henri Frankfort, et. al., Before Philosophy (Penguin, Baltimore, 1949).
disconnectedness of the “objective” puts nature, even human
nature, at a distance from the detached observers. Positivism
moves to an absolute divide between human understanding
and human performance, and leaves us with pondering how
to bridge the divide between our descriptions of the world
and our directions for ways to live in it. In the 20 th Century,
ethics became seen as arguments between the deontologists
and the consequentialists over the best way out of
quandaries and dilemmas about particular actions rather than
a participation in an ethos, and meta-ethical quandaries
arose over just how rational a logos for an ethos could be.
But even within the religious sphere, an anti-mythical
attitude came to prevail. The 19 th Century liberal
discrimination of the Mythical Christ from the Historical
Jesus brought the fundamentalist reaction of a literalism that
claimed historical status for sacred scriptures and infallible
accounts in the doctrines interpreting them. This left the left
pondering what to do with the mythical detachment and the
right accenting a literalist logos that failed to frame a
common ethos. The existentialist reaction to both the
scientific abstraction and the religious disintegration was no
more in sympathy with the mythical, treating it as “bad
faith” that shifted the responsibility for self-determination to
another. Perhaps all of these rejections of myth can be seen
in Rudolf Bultmann's attempts at de-mythologization, but as
Karl Jasper's critically noted, any such attempt simply
amounts to a re-mythologization. As such, it remains a
disabled mythos, a world view that severs an objective
account from subjective engagement, and leaves the actor
out of account, and out of touch with the ethos that gives
meaning to his or her being in the world.

Jaspers was not alone in this sort of affirmation of the

significance of myth. Most famous perhaps was Mircea
Eliade, but others might call Joseph Campbell or even Ernst
Cassirer to mind. Perhaps more obliquely influential was the
work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In his early essay in Three
Metaphysical Beliefs, he outlined how story was originally
expressed in performance and how that ritualistic
performance in turn laid the basis for practice. We find
similar treatments in Eliade, Cassirer and others, but this
account carried MacIntyre into a career of examining the
histories of ethics, and a culminating conviction that the best
way to understand ethics is not in terms of rational rules and
objectives, but in terms of the practices of the people. In this
he intimated the basic integration of mythos, ethos and logos
through performance, only to later lament in After Virtue its
loss. Perhaps in a similar vein, Nicholas Berdyav's retreat to
The New Middle Ages can be seen as a despair of seeing
such integration in our times. More direct was Paul Tillich's
notion of a “broken myth” in which it was acknowledged as
not a claim on objective reality, but still a basis for
understanding one's place in this world. Each of these seeks
to come to terms with mythic significance in an alien world.

I have throughout been intentionally ambiguous in my

talk of performance. In one sense, I have referred to the
performance of myth as a story presented theatrically, in
which performers represent the story. In another, there is the
performance of a mythos in an ethos, both generally as
orientation for acting and thinking and specifically for ways
to characterize particular habits and customs. There may yet
be a third way that brings the two together. It may be that in
the enactment of the mythos in theatrical performance (or
painting or sculpture or novel, music or other depiction) that
those who experience that performance become caught up in
it so that they too are a participating part of the performance.
This is what carries the performance of the mythos into the
practices of everyday life. This the rationale for the
continual performances of the Jewish passover and the
Christian communion. To what extent such as these can have
the value of carrying the mythos into the ethos and logos of
our fractured, pluralistic, secularized culture may depend
less on the unity of the myths than on the value of
participation in the performance.